


Stuck in the Middle With You

by ElloPoppet



Series: WinterHawk Bingo Square Fills - 2019 [8]
Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bucky Barnes Has PTSD, Clint Barton Has PTSD, Getting Together, M/M, Magic, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Relationship, Spells & Enchantments, WinterHawk Bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-21 23:50:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21291182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElloPoppet/pseuds/ElloPoppet
Summary: As Clint witnessed countless murders, trips to the chair, and breath freezing within a cryo tube from Bucky’s perspective, Bucky cried freely just feet away as he met Loki secondhand through Clint’s memories. They would both later say that they felt trapped in each other’s history for years, would both argue with Steve, Sam and Tony when they explained in voices that were much too calm that the entire experience lasted less than three minutes.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Series: WinterHawk Bingo Square Fills - 2019 [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1439719
Comments: 43
Kudos: 168
Collections: Winterhawk Bingo





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For WinterHawk BINGO 2019.
> 
> 1\. I'm in a mood. Have some angst.
> 
> 2\. Hopefully I won't be in a mood when I post the second half, because I only believe in posting happy endings. It'll be okay, I promise. 
> 
> 3\. I love all of your faces and I hope you enjoy <3

The problem, as Tony was so quick to point out, wasn’t that Clint and Bucky had gotten hit in battle. No. The true issue at hand was that they had been hit with a _spell_ cast by a fucking _wizard_.

Though it wasn’t the first time for either of them, and likely wouldn’t be the last, this was by far the most unpleasant experience that they had been through in years. Bucky had been managing himself well for the last eighteen months, growing mentally stronger and more resilient every day since he relocated from Wakanda to the compound. Meanwhile, Clint was a mere six months out from finally, _finally_ finishing his mandated therapy sessions following the Battle of New York (though, if he were being honest, they hadn’t been mandated for that last year. Self-mandated, sure, but SHIELD couldn’t really mandate shit after being exposed as having been infiltrated by HYDRA now, could they?). 

Naturally, the universe couldn’t allow for Clinton Frances Barton and James Buchanan Barnes to be healthy and functioning human beings for too long. Hell, the fact that they had both been doing well (as teammates and as individuals) had likely thrown the world off of its axis. 

And that? Well. No good, a world off of its axis. And therefore it made perfect, rational sense that it would be the two of them hit with the wayward spell where they stood sniping from a rooftop above the rest of the team. Not Tony and Steve, who were disgustingly infatuated with each other and probably knew the ins and outs of one another in every conceivable way. No, the purple tendrils of magic didn’t manage to wrap themselves around Nat and Bruce, either, regardless of their growing closeness and whispered vulnerabilities behind closed doors. 

The wisps simply _had_ to find their way around the throats of Clint and Bucky, teammates, friends, sharpshooter bros, nothing more in any sense of the word. It happened in a flash (quite literally), the magic feeling cold and wet around Clint’s throat and oddly enough his head, as though he had stepped beneath an icy spray of water. His bow clattered to the surface of the roof, followed seconds later by Bucky’s rifle. Clint couldn’t tell, couldn’t recall even later, but he hit the cement surface first, his knees taking the brunt of the impact, though Bucky followed merely a breath afterward. 

And though they remained there, legs and bodies supported by the reinforced rooftop below their knees, they sank all the same. Clint’s mind was thrust into a pool of memories, his vision blurring and taking strange shapes even with his eyes wide open. It took him seconds (minutes? hours?) to realize what had happened (futzing wizards and their goddamn magic), and what was happening as a result. Memories flashed before his mind’s eye; brightly colored, temperature experienced as a full tactile sensation, and christ, everything was so _loud_ and _cold_ and, and…

_Russian._

As Clint kept sinking, enveloped further and further into Bucky’s memories with every passing heartbeat, Bucky’s experience was a near mirror to Clint’s. A fun-house mirror, maybe, in that Bucky was watching Clint’s memories in his mind as though watching a film. There was warm and tacky air, the smell of stale popcorn, the airy feeling of flying and flashes of the brightest blue Bucky had ever seen. And that voice...who was that, speaking to Clint in such a way? Making demands, chuckling darkly, spurring him on?

As Clint witnessed countless murders, trips to the chair, and breath freezing within a cryo tube from Bucky’s perspective, Bucky cried freely just feet away as he met Loki secondhand through Clint’s memories. They would both later say that they felt trapped in each other’s history for years, would both argue with Steve, Sam and Tony when they explained in voices that were much too calm that the entire experience lasted less than three minutes. 

It couldn’t have been such a short amount of time, they argued. In no reality would it take only three minutes to wreak havoc in their minds and bodies in such a way that would leave Bucky sobbing and gasping for breath and Clint vomiting and clutching his skull upon tumbling back into his own head. 

Three minutes to undo so much healing, to open fresh wounds over emotional scarred tissue, to take both of them back to a place of feeling lostsickhopeless_terrified_.

Three. Fucking. Minutes.

*

After getting checked out by Bruce and Dr. Cho once everyone was safely back at the compound, Clint took the back corridor and emergency stairwell back to his room rather than chancing the hallways. Running into Bucky wasn’t something that he was sure he could tolerate, not so soon after being exposed so intimately to the horrors that he had experienced over decades and decades of being used as a weapon for a bunch of Nazi bastards. 

Knowing that Bucky had taken a dip into his own traumatic background certainly wasn’t helpful, either. The sense of shame that Clint had tried so damn hard to successfully overcome was back with a vengeance, as though he had killed fourteen SHIELD agents just the day before. When Clint thought about looking at Bucky, he felt nothing but excruciating heartache; when he thought about Bucky looking back at him, he felt like the lowest form of bacteria on the planet. 

He _liked_ Barnes, was the thing. Liked him a lot, and did his best to interject himself into Bucky’s daily life as much as possible because for some unfathomable reason, Bucky seemed to enjoy his company as well. And now? Now?

How would Bucky be able to look Clint in the eye, knowing what he did? Having experienced first hand the choices that Clint had made...because that’s what they had been. Loki leisurely mucking about in his brain, whispering commands to him in such a way that made everything seem like a good idea was NOT the same as being wiped, frozen, used and tortured by an organization who controlled ones very livelihood. There was no way that Bucky would ever look at him the same way, and that very thought sent Clint spiraling into such a pit of despair that he didn’t bother to turn on the lights within his room, or even take off his boots for that matter. Rather, Clint slammed the door shut behind him, walked until his thighs hit his bed, and curled under his covers still clad in his uniform and boots. 

The nightmares would come, Clint knew. He just wasn’t sure _whose_.


	2. Chapter 2

Bucky? He’d been through the ringer a time or two in his life. 

Stolen from himself both figuratively and literally. Pieces removed, attached, used as though he were nothing more than a doll in the hands of cruel children. He leeched onto moments of warmth for decades before having them seeped away from him again, and again. 

There was so much blood on Bucky’s hands that he avoided looking at them too closely, fearing the sight of viscera ingrained beneath his nailbeds. 

That being said, the one thing that Bucky had never had to battle with over his time as the Winter Soldier was sentiment. Caring for the sanctity of human life in general was something that only started to shroud his mind when he had been left out of cryo for too long, when they had let him exist in the world for a span of time without refreshing his trigger words. Even then, Bucky had never murdered someone that he knew, that he cared about. He would deal with layers and layers of anguish later, particularly over his gut-wrenching guilt over Howard and Maria Stark, but even so would come out of the fog to realize that their deaths were on HYDRA and not on him. Not on Bucky.

Clint, he came to learn after the fucking godforsaken spell, endured a trauma that ran parallel to his. Similar in overarching aspects, but so very different in others, in ways that tore Bucky asunder internally as he lay in his bed after medical, trying to breathe full breaths and finding himself unable to do so because of the lingering _weight_ on his chest. 

Clint, that sunny, goofy, smart and skilled as hell man that Bucky had grown to trust with his life when the bullets, lasers and acid went flying around them? He experienced sentiment. It was plain to see in every memory, etched into every flayed open wound that played out in front of Bucky’s eyes on that rooftop. 

Clint knew the name of every agent that had been killed by his actions seven years prior. He had known some of their partners, had given piggyback rides to one of their children at a SHIELD family event back when SHIELD was pretending to be something it wasn’t. And Clint with a heart so big and willing to _feel_? Bucky wondered if anybody had the capacity to even guess how much those agents' deaths had wreaked havoc on his life, his psyche. 

Bucky didn’t even know that it was possible to hurt like this and still function. All he had done was watch and his old demons were threatening to break free, an anxiety attack squirming in his chest. He needed help, help from someone who understood.

On his way to Clint’s apartment, Bucky wondered how he had never realized that maybe Clint was the one who could have understood his suffering most of all. 

*

Clint was sweating when he woke to the feeling of hands on his clavicles. 

His typical response of springing into instant action was shaken by the fact that he was still trying to consciously escape a nightmare. The smell of blood still lingered in his mind, mingled with the thick smoke of the car crash and the sounds of Maria Stark being strangled to death. It took two heartbeats before Clint opened his eyes fully, pulling himself back into the world and finding that it was Bucky holding him down in his own bed. 

“What the actual hell, Barnes?” Clint bit out. Bucky’s hands disappeared immediately as he removed them from Clint’s body and held them palms forward. All clear, no weapons, I surrender. 

“Friday let me in. Said you were in distress. Glad she did, too. You looked like you were edging on a seizure or something else awful,” Bucky explained, voice low and scratchy. Clint felt himself relax a touch. Silence hung between them as Clint swallowed and sat up, pulling his covers off of his legs in the process in an attempt to soothe his burning body. 

“You got dirt in your bed,” Bucky commented lamely, as though he hadn’t meant to say it at all. Clint sighed and ran his hands over his face. 

“Sit down, will ya? You’re making me nervous, standing over me like that.”

Bucky’s face flushed as he sat on the edge of Clint’s bed, tentative and looking apologetic. 

“Right. Sorry.” Silence for a beat. “I...we’re both a little fucked right about now, huh?”

Clint laughed and for what it was worth, it only sounded a little bit sarcastic. 

“Sure. Let’s say that. Thought I was over being this fucked up. Shoulda known it wouldn’t last,” Clint said, and Bucky’s spine tingled with an unnamed emotion that felt overwhelmingly close to guilt. 

“I’m-” he started, stopping to look down in surprise when Clint whacked him in the middle of the chest with the back of his hand. 

“Nope. Don’t even with that shit. I don’t blame you, asshole, I blame the damn stupid assclown wizard.” Clint’s voice was grave, seeping with anger, and it made Bucky smile in spite of himself. That was his mistake, it would seem; smiling led to his eyes misting over. He didn’t understand it, but decided that fighting wouldn’t be worth it. 

“Hey,” Clint said, softer than before. “Hey, Buck. It’s...I know. You know that I know, heh. But it’s okay. It’s fucked up but it’s okay, right?”

When Bucky looked up, cheeks wet and salt on his lips, he couldn’t find the words to say to Clint. Not with Clint’s eyes softening like they were and taking on a shine of their own. 

“You’re so strong,” Bucky whispered. “I don’t know how you...Clint, I just.” The words stopped coming, Bucky’s throat tightening, tears coming faster. 

Clint, for how puzzled he looked at Bucky’s statement, acted on impulse. Well, impulse and the need for contact, the need to break the feeling of being touch-starved that lingered from Bucky’s own memories. Clint reached out, opening his arms and intending to pull Bucky into them. Instead, Bucky met him halfway and leaned; a well-choreographed moment of grief. 

The feeling of Bucky’s hair between his fingers and beneath his palm soothed Clint as he stroked the wavy locks. The moisture of Bucky’s tears where he leaned against Clint’s chest expanded as Bucky cried with abandon; he wasn’t sobbing and as they rocked together it was a silent endeavor, the bonds of trauma, understanding and healing thickening the air around them in a not completely unpleasant way. 

Neither knew how long they stayed there, half curled together and fully dressed in Clint’s bed, though they were certain this time it was longer than three minutes. The rocking stopped first, followed shortly by Bucky’s crying and harsh breathing; Clint continued to stroke Bucky’s hair, however, and Bucky reciprocated by making circles over the flesh of Clint’s hipbone with his thumb where he had slipped it beneath Clint’s shirt. 

“We’ll get through the shit, right?” Bucky asked after a long while, voice calm, finally lifting his head from Clint’s chest to look up at him with round, red rimmed and beautiful eyes.

Clint leaned down ever so slightly, resting his forehead against Bucky’s. 

“You’re goddamn right we will,” Clint said, the certainty in his voice convincing them both where they lay, breathing each other’s air.

“We’ll do it together.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BINGO Square: PTSD


End file.
